Sunday, December 19, 2010

Adopted: For the Life of Me illustrates how sealed records hurt

Lorraine

Riding on a train not so long ago I struck up a conversation with the man sitting next to me, and in time I was talking about the sealed birth records of adopted people. He was surprised--no, amazed is more like it--that adoptees couldn't get their original birth certificates and find out who they are justlikethat. By asking for them. And ditto for birth/first parents when the kids are adults.

I explained that no, it wasn't like that, and all the movies on television (of which he has some knowledge) and just plain old common sense about what is right to the contrary, adoptees in all but ten states are unable to get their original birth certificates, and that even in some of those states there are some restrictions. As for us birth mothers, tossed away like yesterday's newspapers, forget about it.

Jean Strauss's movie, Adopted: For the Life of Me, is a compelling antidote to the utterly inhumane system in place in most of the country that prevents adults from knowing the truth of their origins. Strauss follows Dave Kiley, a college administrator she meets on a plane, as he goes to the Massachusetts Vital Records bureau and gets his identifying information at age 52, all the way to meeting friends of his mother in Maine, where she had lived. Her visits her grave, he touches things that were hers, he learns the story of why he was given up for adoption for the first time.

Look, many of you know from previous posts that I'm a weeper, whether from birth mother trauma or not, and the movie had me right from the beginning, but I can't imagine a dry eye in the house when a friend of his mother's pulls out a scrapbook of poems--dozens of poems--that Dave's mother, Isabella, collected over the years, and Dave reads one of them aloud:

I want a boy
A small boy, a not-so-very-tall boy,
A boy I can talk with,
And take a long walk with,
Then home again to chatter over
what we've seen,
I want a boy who needs me
As I need him.

Yes, I know it's a schmaltzy, sentimental poem but it gives voice to the emptiness that so many of use first mothers have felt when our children are out there in the void, when our children are missing. But this isn't so much about first mothers, the movie is about the real anguish of being denied your identity--and first mothers do not suffer that indignity--unless they too were adopted, a not uncommon occurrence. Strauss captures the cosmic emptiness of not knowing spot on with the story of Dave, whose original name was Bruce Edward Kegresse. He learns from her friends that he was given up for adoption because she was badly abused by her father, with the implication that she would have brought her son home, and she feared that he too would be abused.

Isabella kept the secret of her son quite close, though she did tell another mutual acquaintance, someone who was doing a search for another adoptee. Isabella had closely followed the progress of the search, and when the woman asked her why she was so interested, Isabella told her. Isabella believed her son would not look for her until his parents died. I don't remember if we learn whether Dave's adoptive parents are deceased, but if he had done his search a few years earlier, he would have met his mother. Message: Don't wait. Don't wait another week, month or year.

Like many first mothers, Isabella never had other children, so Dave has no siblings. He does meet her dog, a Brittany spaniel, which his mother's friends have kept, and makes the observation that "Brittany" is the name of his daughter, one of those coincidences that we find all the time in adoption connections.

The movie also follows another adoptee, Joe Degironimo, 68, as he learns that in the Eighties he lived quite close to a family home. He finds and meets a half-sister, a daughter of his father, in a diner one afternoon. Strauss, in an voice-over, notes that his sister, instead of treating him like a dirty little secret, accepts him as family and "the brother she always wanted to have." She gives him several of the very few possessions of her father that she has. "It's strange meeting your sister after sixty-eight years," Joe reflects, "it's a good feeling but at the same time, Man! what the hell you had to go through to find out who you are and who your family is."

What is so compelling about the people in the film in their age: they are not youngsters, they are not "children," they are adults. Yet of course they are the children of someone who is real--first mothers like many of us--and the film follows a few of them as they make their way back to their roots. You see brave and tireless Pam Hasegawa of New Jersey, who has made changing the sealed-records law her life's work, and who herself will probably never find her own roots; you see a woman in her nineties ask that she learn the true story of who she is before she dies; and you see how easily truth is meted out in Kansas where the records were never sealed. You see someone in Kansas City, Kansas get her records for $18 in 18 minutes, while right across State Line Road, in Kansas City, Missouri, two women are denied and told to write to their legislators.

As Jean says at the end of the movie:

"Every human being in on a journey. But that journey is more difficult if they don't know where they began. In the end, one has to ask who is being served by this life sentence of secrecy?"

I mean, come on people! How in the world, in a just, sane world, can it be right to separate these people who so clearly need each other? Who can give each other solace and peace in their hearts? We all need to be connected to someone out there to feel whole, as if we didn't spring whole from the earth with no connections, but yet the laws in most states deny our children that very right. We first mothers had no say as to whether we wanted to seal their records, to hide our identities from them, yet now that forced anonymity is being used against our children who are told we must have such secrecy. The situation is so convoluted and absurd, yet there it stands and there is will stand unless we speak out against it, one by one by one by one all over the country. Let us make our voices heard in a giant roar announcing that such separation is wrong, cruel, and so certainly unjust.

Adopted: For the Life of Me is a powerful compelling film that makes a irrefutable argument for open records for all adopted people. It has been shown on several PBS stations around the country, and the website has listed where it has been shown and invites you to schedule private screenings. For information, contact Jean Strauss at adoptedforthelifeofme@gmail.com. Bring your hanky--and a legislator! Every person we convince of the right of our cause brings us one step closer to freedom from the shackles of sealed records. --lorraine

8 comments
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How is it right to separate people who need each other but have a human right to know about each other and be family? Reunion comes to many of us late in life, adding to the cruelty because so many years have been stolen and can't be given back.

Why is it that we can not get it into the American psyche that the biological connection matters? Why do we treat children as if it makes no difference whether they are raised in their bio-families or not or even know who they are? There is a reason that the vast majority of people raise their biological children. And that most families consist of people related by blood. This separation is unnatural and cruel. It seems that Australia has figured this out? Why can't we?

Lorraine wrote:" He was surprised--no, amazed is more like it--that adoptees couldn't get their original birth certificates and find out who they are justlikethat."

Well, this certainly brings me back to earth spending so much time in the adoption world that it is true, the vast majority of people know next to nothing of what it is like to be adopted or to be a first mother. They just know and believe what popular culture tells them (i.e. Adoption is a beautiful thing, it's the best option for a young, single mother and okay they usually admit "adopted kids have problems" but a married couple is still best for them.

Those of us here do give and get a lot of support from one another but we are talking to the already convinced and the knowledgeable (through the school of hard knocks). It seems that one of the most important issues is changing the laws so that first mothers have at least 6 weeks before they can sign away their parental rights. So many of the stories we deal with her like Grayson/Ben, baby Emma, etc are like trying to lock the barn after the horse has escaped. How can we educate, make this part of the culture that natural parents need more time so that there wouldn't be so many of these horror stories of trying to get back one's baby when it is so often too late?

And of course, we need activism and education on the OBC issue.

Adoption is an important issue and it affects many people. It's shocking that most people know so little about it and its impact.

I also deeply appreciate advocacy of Lorraine Dusky and Jane Edwards. First families should be supported to keep them together if at all possible! The "baby market" should be eliminated in favor of supporting these families. There are thousands of older children both in the US and foreign born who do not have any family with one iota of interest in them. These are the children grow up in state care. We as an American society and world society should encourage those wishing to be parents to adopt children truly without any hope of family support. Family information should be provided no matter how difficult the circumstances. It is reality after all. And the barbaric practice of sealing OBC should be stopped with existing records unsealed. There are plenty of wonderful children out there who desperately need parent or parents for those willing to parent them. This the only win-win alternative for children.

A beautiful song from a Korean adoptee

From the New York Times

"Lorraine Dusky, a writer who relinquished a daughter as a young single mother in New York State in 1966, supports opening the records. She reported in her 2015 memoir that in the handful of states that offered women the opportunity to remove their names from original birth certificates, only a small fraction of women — fewer than 1 percent — chose to do so." --Don’t Keep Adopted People in the Dark by Gabrielle Glaser, June 19, 2018

Who Are We?

From the New York Times

"On FirstMotherForum.com, a blog that discusses issues among women who had given children up for adoption, Lorraine Dusky, one of the site’s authors, praised the series (ABC's 10-episode Find My Family): 'Maybe this will be heard by people who think it is unloyal somehow for a person to search out his or her roots, parents, family, when it is a most natural desire of consciousness.'--Two Reality Shows Stir Publicity and Anger"--Dec. 6, 2009.

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"It shouldn't take a miracle to find people you are related to by blood."--Jenn Gentlesk